Comment by franciscop
3 years ago
The housing space metrics seem very far off from my experience, looking at numbers it seems "Tokyo" means "Tokyo Metropolis", which includes the countryside, mountains, etc. So it's not really comparing the city. If we look at the numbers for Tokyo 23 wards[1] (what would traditionally be called "the city"), we can see they are virtually half than those from Paris or London:
16.5-19.7sqm/person is the range that falls in the median (50%) for Tokyo 23 wards[1]. Only 30% of houses have the minimum recommended of 25sqm/person (so, 70% live UNDER in under 25sqm/person). If the other cities in the graph are correct, that makes Tokyo median size around half of the average of those other cities[2].
So yes, definitely Tokyo housing is tiny. I know it since I live here and talk with people; when I invite someone who is not in tech to my place they all comment on how big my 37 sqm "house" (studio/single room) is, to which I can only agree and laugh/cry inside. I'm happy because I am well for living in Tokyo, but it's still a tiny place compared to my hometown where everyone lives like kings.
[1] https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/how-much-living-sp...
[2] I believe I'm using median/average correctly here, but happy for corrections! I check "at what sizes it's 50% of the # of households" and then took that measure. Sorry for mixing medians and averages, but I cannot calculate averages with the numbers I found.
> The housing space metrics seem very far off from my experience
I have friend living in Tokyo paying <10万円 in rent for a (very small) single unit. A couple other friends share a larger unit and pay similar per person. All are in the 23 wards. This is unimaginable for other friends living in Paris (one of the 20 Arrondissements) and New York (one of the 5 boroughs), regardless of size. I have no anecdata on London.
Regarding size, I was far more comfortable living in a ~550sqft 1LDK in Japan than I ever was in 800sqft-1000sqft apartments in North America - everything is geared to living in tighter quarters (from furniture to fridge to food packaging) making it much more convenient than trying to fit a full size couch into a small western apartment, or trying to save by bulk buying ingredients when you don't have the space to store it.
So I think the title of the article is half right (rent is cheaper than you'd think), missing some key info (wages are also cheaper than you'd think), half of it is roughly incorrect (housing is not any more spacious than you'd think), and the article itself doesn't back it up well.
I never mentioned anything about prices though :)
550sqft (52sqm) for a single person is unheard of here. Look at the article I shared, unfortunately it cuts off at 30sqm, meaning ALL the houses of 30sqm or more make up 22% of the total. Assuming a normal distribution that peaks around 20sqm/person, you should've lived in the top 1-2% of Tokyo.
I feel like Paris' 20 Arrondissements is too small, comparable to Zone 1 of London and "Yamanote area" in Tokyo, while New York 5 boroughs is a lot bigger and more comparable with 23 Wards. But anyway let's go with it, since at least it's much better than comparing it with Tokyo Metropolitan. With Airbnb (which is usually a lot more expensive than long-term rental) I can find a bunch of places for under 1k USD:
https://imgur.com/a/FIODYlo
For London I could literally not find any, and for Tokyo also a bunch of places (you might notice that these are way further from the center than the area of Paris, but hey I said that was fair):
https://imgur.com/a/0XEvBcT
So it seems that London is particularly expensive, similar to Tokyo's Yamanote; while Paris 20 Arrondissements are at a similar place as Tokyo 23 wards.
C'mon mate you can't be for real, you can't just look at Airbnb data and make any conclusions about rent from that. They literally target different audiences.
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People living in Tokyo don't check AirBNB to find apartments to rent
Unfortunately, the sites they DO use are entirely in Japanese, so you're not going to be able to get usfeful infographic data in a few minutes
AirBNB is extremely unpopular in Japan, it's not a good comparison for anything. Searching on Suumo I can see over 100,000 apartments over 50m^2 listed (which doesn't prove much of anything, but gives an idea).
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Yes, my 550sqft (was a very rough size approximation, 5 yrs ago from memory) was certainly not in Tokyo, and the 4万 (plus utilities) that I paid for rent was seen as expensive. I was just using it as a basis to show that straight space comparisons between japan residences and north american residences aren't reasonable, as everything is geared to smaller living.
I live in a 95sqm apartment in the city for 26万/m, and I'm in an expensive area. When I was looking for apartments, I found lots of 60+sqm apartments for <20万/m even in some of the pricer areas. For standalone houses, you can find plenty of 70+sqm houses for purchase at ~5000万, which would have a mortgage of around 15万 a month.
It's important to note that you can get a mortgage at a rate somewhere between 0.6-1.6%, which means that even for seemingly high prices, you can buy something and have a surprisingly low mortgage cost.
Yes, the numbers are a bit skewed by the fact that more people live alone in Tokyo than Paris or NYC, but it's definitely true that you get more square meters per $ in Tokyo. Also, it is true that people on Tokyo on average earn less than NYC, London and Paris, but they also spend a smaller percentage of their total income on housing, so housing is cheaper in PPP terms too. I'll dig out the exact numbers tomorrow if anyone is interested, but now I'm out in one of Tokyo's extremely cheap bar districts having skewers and beers for less than $10
Do you know numbers about how much housing is sponsored by the companies in Japan? Maybe that's what is making the difference since it's not counted neither as salary, nor as the price of the house? I know some large companies sponsor partially or totally the housing of thousands of their employees, again skewing prices greatly.
For example if Tanaka's salary is $500 lower because the company is partially paying for their place, that means on paper his salary is lower, the price of the place is MUCH lower, and the ratio of housing/salary is also lower, than if he received those $500 and then used it to pay for the house.
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I lived 3 mins from Asagaya station (10 mins to Shinjuku) with my wife in a 23m2 apartment for 70k yen ($475) and loved it, very sunny apartment in a bustling neighborhood, tons of great street life, with everything I needed arranged very compactly. It requires an adjustment that location, not space, is the luxury (don’t invite friends over, go places with them). Probably part of why there are always so many people on the streets everywhere.
I lived in 250sqft with a shared bathroom in NYC for 2 years and loved it. Loved in 800 sqft in suburban America for 4 months and couldn’t handle it. In a big city with affordable Third Spaces you can simply live outside of your apartment.
The thing is that you’re not living in your apt. You live in the city with all the buzz.
In the suburbs you’ll have to get that buzz in your house somehow
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10万円 = 100,000 yen, which is about:
USD 675.18
EURO 683.40
GBP 588.43
For anyone who is interested but too lazy to search
To be clear, in the last one year, the Japanese yen vs US dollar has declined by about 23%: 148 JPY/USD vs 114 JPY/USD. As a result, "dollarised" Tokyo real estate suddenly looks very cheap. For foreign investors / foreign captial, yes, this is true. For local residents / local investors, there is still almost zero inflation here. As a result, local real estate prices are mostly unaffected by USD/JPY FX rates.
When looking at real estate expenses from perspective of local residents, it is always best to look at local currency median income. If median income or real estate prices are unchanged relative to local currency median income, who cares(!). The rest is just an article in a financial newspaper!
We need a disclaimer since from ~last month FX has gone crazy, whether we are using old or new numbers. For me I'm still thinking 10万円 is:
USD ~1000 (a bit less, but just insignificant)
EUR 800~900
And virtually all articles you find today regarding real estate, USD vs JPY, etc. will be talking with old numbers. It's important to talk about the new numbers, but I'd wait a bit for them to stabilize before being "acktually the yen now is" in articles (I'm not saying parent comment is doing that, just warning that those people are everywhere).
In terms of costs of living and salary percentage, 100,000 yen feels like it's around $1000 or so.
For context, a new grad will probably end up making around 200,000 - 250,000 yen (before taxes) a month at a lot of places.
Note that the JPY lost about 30% of value this year, while rent (nor wages, nor cost of living) haven't caught up to those figures. For the past few years, the JPY/USD rate was around 110.
I don't know about NY or Paris, but the comparison against London seems fair enough. They seem to be using a Tokyo metropolitan area of about 2000 km^2, and comparing it with Greater London at 1572 km^2.
And indeed, people throughout Greater London are entirely used to living in small, damp, shared boxes.
The geography of the "cities" is very different though (look at the density of population maps provided), where "Tokyo Metropolitan" is one third pure mountains, then one third low-density living (think L.A.) and then one third what people normally thinks of the city of Tokyo, all of these in a sausage-like shape, while "Greater London" grows in a circle and so it's a circle-ish area.
See this image with the labels, we should compare the green one instead of the 3 of them. Ideally "Tokyo" would be something more like the purple one, but the purple one is nothing. So we have "23 wards" (green), or Tokyo Metropolitan (the 3 together), neither of which is the best comparison, but def the green one vs London is much better than all of them (the purple dashes are how I think London would look like approx):
https://imgur.com/a/nCmkE80
To complement your post: To be clear, no one with a deep understanding of Tokyo area considers anything outside the "23 ku's" as Tokyo. Really, Okutama, Tokyo (two hours west of world's busiest train station: Shinjuku) is comically rural -- literally, there are big mountains and small family farms that grow wasabi (delicious!). Yes, the province of Tokyo is enormous and includes lots of protected nature (and lovely hiking trails!), but when most people say "Tokyo" they mean the central 23 cities ("ku's"). If you want to get more specific, Tokyoites sometimes discriminiate between inside and outside the loop train line called Yamanote line. It is definitely the sense of urban and ex-urban in Tokyo.
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And even for the "green" area, a good part of it is not that dense. I mean, it is still packed, but most of it is made of small 2 story houses rather than large apartment complexes and high rise buildings.
The real dense part that looks like the pictures of Tokyo you have most likely seen is around the Yamanote line, a train line that circles an area that is about 1/10 of the green area.
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If you want to take a more principled approach to size here, you should use a metric that corresponds to how humans interact with the region. Pick a point to call the center and find all the points with a round trip time less than some number.
I’ve had the good fortune to visit Tokyo several times, and visited a few apartments of friends who have regular middle class jobs: animators, cooks, tailors. Every apartment was tiny. Like less than half the size of any apartment I've ever lived in at any point of my life living in Los Angeles or San Francisco.
I’ve stayed many times with a friend whose father is a well-known Japanese movie actor and even they live in a house which would be modest by any US suburban standard, in a quiet part of a nice neighborhood (kichijoji) but still an 8-10 minute walk to trains and very bustling, active parts of town.
The thing I’ve found remarkable with Tokyo is how walkable it is and how, despite how crowded and dense it can seem, the street level experience can feel very accessible and not at all overwhelming. Many good parks, walking paths and general accommodations for people not in cars.
I'm sure you've researched this and sure some apartments in Tokyo are small. I'd like to touch upon the big-house comment, though. It may be that your Japanese friends say that simply because it is polite, and very common, thing to say when you visit someone's house for the first time.
Thanks for the additional info, I found it a rather terrible article. Even taking its numbers at face value, it makes me sad for non-Americans. The difference between the NY average of 43 sqm vs the rest is essentially an extra room.
When I thought I was going to be living in Tokyo for work for a couple of years, I had started to spend some significant time looking for places to rent, and yeah - I had to go out to Saitama or Chiba to find anything that I would be comfortable living in without paying absurd prices.
Which, honestly, wasn't the worst. 40 minutes to an hour on the JR is 10-30 minutes more than my current commute, but I could have dealt with that in exchange for more space.
> The housing space metrics seem very far off from my experience, looking at numbers it seems "Tokyo" means "Tokyo Metropolis", which includes the countryside, mountains, etc. So it's not really comparing the city.
Yep. In that case half of Berkshire, Hampshire, Kent, Surrey etc. should count as well.
It is the price one has to pay for living in the city and being fashionable.
I see this in Amsterdam: rich expats who barely grasp that there is a country outside the city.
If they are considering Tokyo Metropolis, they might be including Ogasawara, which is 1000km from downtown Tokyo.